Chapter 5370: Records and Knowledge I

Dame Seraphine stepped forward to meet Borys, and the rushing pressure of him broke against the first thing out of her mouth.

"By the Honor of THE Queen Regnant," she said, "and the Source she has granted me."

She did not say it as a battle cry. She said it the way a person says a thing they have said many times, an oath worn smooth by use, the words a hinge that something larger turned upon. And as the last of them left her, she changed!

HUUM!

Her figure unmade its ordinary shape and became light. Obsidian stellar light, deep and dark and shining at once, the form of a Source Lifeform setting aside the body it wore for company and showing instead the thing it actually was underneath. The armor was gone. The graceful woman was gone. What stood in the storm of THE Maw was a being of pure obsidian radiance, and the dying converted air around her flinched back from it.

She reached up into the dark above her, and her fingers closed on a handle that was forming there.

A sword. Obsidian, growing as she gripped it, and it did not stop growing at the length of a sword a person carries. It grew past that, and past that, until it measured itself in gigaparsecs, a blade vast enough that the mine could not have held it if the mine were the thing it was being drawn in. It was being drawn somewhere larger. It was being drawn in existence itself!

"THE Primordial Reclamation," she said.

BOOM!

There are many wondrous beings in existence. Many Lifeforms grand enough that the telling of them sounds like exaggeration to those who have never stood near one.

Dame Seraphine, in this moment, with the obsidian blade rising at her hand, was one of the beings the others would have called grand. She did not often show it. The administration of Oaths did not require it, and she was a being who spent only what a task demanded. This task demanded it!

THE Primordial Reclamation did a simple thing, and simple things at the Fifth Scale are rarely small.

It reclaimed a span of existence in the name of THE Primordial Source and the one who wielded the blade, and within the reclaimed span, nothing was permitted to be present that the Source and its wielder did not deem acceptable. It did not strike. It did not burn. It decided what was allowed to exist in the space it claimed, and then it made that decision true, and anything the decision excluded was simply denied its place there.

Borys was not deemed acceptable.

The blue-robed thing wearing an Infinite Lifeform’s face came on with its apocalyptic sea of Infinity, its Olympian Intent reorganizing the space ahead of it into law, and it ran headlong into a span of existence that had decided it did not belong. His existence was denied!

BOOOM!

Across the surrounding gigaparsecs, the reclaimed space refused to hold him, and he was pushed back, his charge breaking, his sea of Infinity finding no ground to stand on because the ground itself had stopped recognizing his right to stand on it.

He roared. It was a maddened sound, the fury of a thing that had grown used to having its way and had just met a wall that did not care how grand it had become, his seas of blue Infinity surging against the denial and finding no purchase in it.

Dame Seraphine watched him be pushed back, cold and unhurried in her dazzling obsidian state, the gigaparsec blade held steady. She had bought herself a moment. She had bought the descent a moment. She did not waste it admiring her own work.

She looked to the far distance instead, deeper into THE Maw, deeper than the storms, and she sensed something there.

The blazing rise of an Intent.

An Akashic Civilizational Intent, just forming, just beginning to draw itself together out of whatever existence had birthed it, and the moment her perception touched it she went still inside her radiance. Because she knew Intents!

She had felt thousands of them across her long existence, had administered the Oaths of the Swords who carried them, had stood near Titan-rarity and Olympian-rarity Intents and weighed them with a practiced eye. She knew what they felt like.

This one felt purer than any of them.

It was forming, unfinished, not yet ranked or named or settled into whatever it would become, and already it felt purer than her own Intent. Her own, which she had carried across ages, which sat at a rarity most beings never glimpsed. A thing only beginning to exist already felt cleaner at its core than a thing she had spent an age refining.

Why. Why would a forming Intent feel purer than hers?

HUUM!

Dame Seraphine’s obsidian figure pulsed.

"Let’s go," she said.

And she turned from the denied and roaring Borys, and headed toward the blindingly pulsing Intent in the deep.

---

At that moment, Noah’s eyes were closed, and the scenes of his other bodies were playing through his mind.

He kept many of himself, scattered across many places, and he could attend to all of them at once when he chose to, the way a person attends to many thoughts in a single quiet moment. So while one body sat in the depths of THE Maw refining Eridarch Ore and forging an Intent, others lived, and he let himself watch them live.

One body lay on a beach.

The realm was an endless blue sea meeting a shore of white-gold sand, and the light over it was soft, and he lay back on that sand with his eyes closed and his head resting on Riya’s thighs.

Her petite figure and her short blue hair glistened with blue Mana, and she cradled his head in her lap, and she leaned down now and then to give him light kisses, and she spoke to him tenderly while she did.

"Your Mana is everything," she said against his hair. "Whatever it turns into in the future, however grand it gets, even if you stop calling it Mana and start calling it Infinity. Your Mana is you. It was the first thing. It pulled me to you, and I followed it here." Her thumb traced his temple.

"And now I dream of Mana covering everything. Everything there is. Though I’ll admit, I was wrong once before. I looked at the Mana around you and thought I saw it dwindling, and I was wrong about that, badly wrong, so who knows. Maybe I’m wrong again now." She smiled, soft.

"But your Mana. That will be your ultimate answer to everything. Everything."

...!

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